Executive Summary: The Facts about COPS: A Performance Overview of the Community Oriented Policing Services Program

Executive Summary

One
of President Bill Clinton's priorities when taking office was to
put 100,000 additional police officers on America's streets. To
achieve this goal, on September 13, 1994, he signed the Violent
Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (P.L. 103-322), which
authorized the establishment of the Office of Community Oriented
Policing Services (COPS) within the U.S. Department of Justice.
This program became the federal government's most significant
criminal justice initiative throughout the 1990s. Designed to
support state and local community policing activities to reduce
crime, the program developed into a set of federal grants that cost
American taxpayers $7.5 billion by the end of fiscal year (FY)
2000.1 If COPS has actually
achieved its goal of deploying 100,000 more police, then one in
every six state and local police officers today is federally
funded.

According to the Justice Department, the
COPS program reached an important milestone on May 12, 1999,
"funding the 100,000th officer ahead of schedule and under
budget."2 On August 22, 2000, COPS
officials stated that, "[t]o date, the COPS program has funded more
than 105,000 community policing officers. President Clinton has
proposed continuing the COPS program for an additional five years
to add up to 50,000 more community policing officers to local
communities."3

Are
these estimates valid? And if it is indeed the case that 100,000
additional police officers are now on the street, is it not also
reasonable for policymakers, community leaders, and taxpayers to
ask where these officers have been placed? To evaluate the
effectiveness of the COPS program in reaching its stated goals,
analysts at The Heritage Foundation's Center for Data Analysis
examined the Justice Department's own records in the COPS
Management System database as well as data supplied by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the Uniform Crime Reports for
1994, 1995, and 1998.4

The
results of the Heritage analysis suggest that the COPS program has
put far fewer than 100,000 more police officers on America's
streets. Moreover, many of the jurisdictions receiving COPS grants
have funneled a sizeable portion of that funding into areas that
have comparatively less need to hire more police officers.

Specifically, this study found:

Far fewer than 100,000 additional
officers have been put on the street as a result of COPS.Between 1993, when federal awards for community policing
began,5 and 1998, the total number
of full-time sworn police officers in the United States grew by
87,435--from 553,773 to 641,208.6
Yet a study of the historic rates of growth in the number of police
officers before the COPS program began indicates that the number of
officers who would have been hired without COPS funds would have
increased between 47,818 and 81,204 from 1993 to 1998. In other
words, the number of officers "on the beat" in 1998 is just 6,231
to 39,617 higher than the historic hiring trend suggests would have
occurred without COPS funds.

The lower number of officers on the
street mirrors the conclusions of the Justice Department's own
inspector general.These Heritage findings are compatible with other independent
analyses. For example, in a July 1999 report, the Justice
Department's inspector general stated, "Clearly, the COPS grants
will not result in 100,000 officers on the streets by the end of FY
2000. Based on projections by the COPS Office, only 59,765 of the
additional officers will be deployed by the end of FY 2000."7 This number (59,765) not only includes
the increase in the number of police officers in the United States,
but also counts existing officers who are claimed to be redeployed
to community policing as a result of the hiring of clerical
employees or the purchase of equipment under the COPS program.

A recent report funded by the COPS
Office finds that the program will result in far fewer than 100,000
additional officers on the street.A team of researchers working for the U.S. Department of
Justice found that the COPS program has resulted in a net increase
of between 36,288 and 37,523 police officers in the United States
at the end of 1998.8 Moreover, the
Justice Department report notes that the number of additional
officers hired because of the COPS program will peak at a maximum
of 57,175 in 2001. Even after counting officers who are
"redeployed" due to the purchase of equipment or the hiring of
administrative staff with COPS funds, the Justice Department
researchers found that the number of officers added to the street
will peak at between 68,991 and 84,630 in 2001.

Some police departments have used COPS
funds to "supplant"--or substitute for--local funds they would have
used to hire new officers.An audit of grantees suspected of not complying with the grant
requirements conducted by the inspector general found strong
evidence that the COPS Office's projection of 59,765 additional
police officers still may have overestimated the number of new
officers that would be put on the street. According to an analysis
of 147 "high risk" grant recipients, up to 41 percent used the
money to "supplant local funds."9

Estimates of how many additional hours
officers spend on the street because of COPS grants are
overstated.
The COPS Making Officer Redeployment Effective (MORE) grants were
intended to enable agencies to purchase equipment and hire clerical
staff so that officers could be reassigned from administrative work
to community policing. Yet the inspector general found that almost
four in every five "high risk" recipients (78 percent) "could not
demonstrate they had or would re-deploy officers from
administrative duties to the streets."10

Some funded agencies showed small to no
growth in the numbers of new officers despite receiving large
amounts of COPS funds.Between 1994 and 1998, the Miami Police Department grew by only
21 new officers, according to data the department reported to the
FBI, despite receiving some $45.9 million ($34.4 million for hiring
new officers) in COPS grants between 1993 and 1997. This means that
an average of almost $2.2 million in federal grants was received
for each additional police officer placed on the streets.
Meanwhile, although Atlanta was among the top 20 grant recipients
with a total of $15.3 million ($11 million for hiring new officers)
in COPS funding between 1993 and 1997, the city's police department
reported to the FBI a total of 75 fewer officers by 1998.

The distribution of COPS funds has been
highly concentrated.Almost half (47.7 percent) of the $1.58 billion in COPS funding
allocated to 315 large agencies serving jurisdictions of over
100,000 persons between 1993 and 1997 went to just 10 police
departments. These 10 departments serviced only 21 percent of the
combined population of the 315 communities studied, and their
officers handled only 24 percent of their reported violent
crimes.

Some communities with low crime rates
received large COPS grants.The Heritage analysis found that the 1995 violent crime rates
for at least five of the 20 largest police agencies receiving the
largest grants between 1993 and 1997 were below the average for
comparable jurisdictions.

Endnotes

1.The $7.5 billion figure was obtained by
summing appropriations designated for the Office of Community
Oriented Policing Services and the Office of Justice Programs'
funding for community policing grants. See Public Laws 103-121,
103-317, 104-134, 104-208, 105-119, 105-277, and 106-113.

3.Press release, "COPS Office Announces
Grants to Enhance Law Enforcement Infrastructures and Community
Policing Efforts in Indian Communities," U.S. Department of
Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, August 22,
2000, at http://www.usdoj.gov/cops/news_info/press_releases/default.htm
(August 28, 2000).

4.The authors gratefully acknowledge the
role that Scripps Howard News Service played in initiating this
project. Inquiries from Scripps Howard reporters about the
relationship between COPS grants and crime rate change prompted
analysts from the Center for Data Analysis to construct a database
for this study.

5.Although the COPS program was officially
created under the 1994 Crime Act, this paper references funding
awarded in 1993 since Congress included funding for community
police officers in the Departments of Commerce, Justice, and State,
the Judiciary, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act for Fiscal
Year 1994 (P.L. 103-121). The funds were awarded in calendar year
1993. The Department of Justice referred to these funds as Police
Hiring Supplement (PHS) grants after the Office of Community
Oriented Policing Services (COPS) was created in 1994. PHS grants
were superseded by a set of similar grants administered by the COPS
Office. According to the Justice Department's Office of Inspector
General, PHS grants were a "down payment" in the effort to deploy
100,000 additional officers on the street. See Michael R. Bromwich,
Management and Administration of the Community Oriented Policing
Services Grant Program, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of
Inspector General, Audit Division, Report No. 99-21, July 1999, at
http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/au9921/9921toc.htm (August
18, 2000).

8.U.S. Department of Justice, Office of
Justice Programs, National Evaluation of the COPS Program,
August 2000, pp. 149-176.

9.U.S. Department of Justice, Office of
Inspector General, Special Report: Police Hiring and
Redeployment Grants, Summary of Audit Findings and
Recommendations, Report No. 99-14, April 1999. See also
Bromwich, Management and Administration of the Community
Oriented Policing Services Grant Program.

10.U.S. Department of Justice, Office of
Inspector General, Special Report: Police Hiring and
Redeployment Grants, Summary of Audit Findings and
Recommendations. See also Bromwich, Management and
Administration of the Community Oriented Policing Services Grant
Program.